My sweetie-wife returned home on Friday after spending a week helping take care fo issues surrounding the passing of her mother.
Yesterday we went whale watching. I’ve lived here in San Diego nearly thirty years and I’ve never gone whale watching. It was fun. I had forgotten just how peaceful I find sea travel. Not the same for my honey. She is prone to motion-sickeness so it was not the best of times for her.
So after diner tonight and a long day at work I decided to unwind with a bit of a zombie flick. I put in my blu-ray of the 1979 Dawn Of The Dead. (In my opinion Romero’s best Zombie film.) Anyway since this film was shot in 1979 the soundtrack on the original is a mono-sooundtrack. On the blu-ray they have upgraded it with a re-mastered 5.1 surround soundtrack in lossless PCM output. Well I had my shiny new sound system and subwoofer so I played around watching the film switching back and forth between the various sound sources.
There’s a scene where on of the characters — Stephen — is along and in the bowels of the Mall. He fires at shadows and the rounds go bouncing off into the darkness. Listening to the scene with the 5.1 surround was great. I heard the bullets ricochet completely around my seat. I was really surprised that a re-mastered soundtrack performed so well.
So my sweetie-wife has headed out to her where her mother lived to wrap up affairs there and I am on my own for about the next week. The condo seems much larger and more empty with her here.
At work they have offered more overtime as we are behind on our paperwork. (The bad economy has hammered people hard and that makes them turn to us in greater numbers.) Without anyone to rush home to I am doing the overtime at work. I did two hours tonight and I am likely to do two more tomorrow night.
At home tonight I just watched TV and made my own dinner.
The only bright spot today was that I scored ticket for the next taping of the TV show “The Big Bang Theory.” I’m not much for sit-coms, but I like this one. Of course being a geek really helps and that the fact that the shows isn’t mocking of geeks, but rather it really seems to get geeks and geek culture. I scored a few tickets for friends and one for my sweetie-wife, though she is unlikely to attend, but if she changes her mind I am ready. I am looking forward to next month when we go to LA and watch the show live.
In the we early morning hours this morning, my sweetie-wife’s mother passed away in her sleep. We knew we were dealing with end-of-life issues and now it has come to pass.
I did not have a blog in 2003, so there is not internet history of my opinion on invading Iraq as we geared up towards the war in 2003. However I can state I was flatly against the invasion.
My arguments against the war were fairly simple.
1) Iraq was not a direct threat to the United States at that time.
2) Even if Iraq possessed Weapons Of Mass Destruction a paranoid dictator such as theirs would never let them go out of his control.
3) We would easily overthrow the government but become bogged down in a war with a native insurgency.
4) A new war would distract the U.S. from is primary goal, chasing down and destroying Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.
My friends who supported the war — or described themselves as war-agnostics – dismissed my concerns. I remember quite clear how the last point seemed ridiculous to them.
Well along with the others, point four seems to be gaining evidence lately. See the following quote from a story about a history of the Afgan war written by the Army itself.
First, I am making a slight modification to my work resolution.
When I am working on outlines and plotting notes, that I only need to do five hundred words per night. I found that 1000 was too many. I could do it, and I have been doing it. However it was causing me to not fully develop my ideas. While I am constructing the plot it is important to take the time for feel out the flavor and nuance of each idea so that I can properly understand where it is taking me.
When I am working in narrative, that will require a 1000 words per work night before I can play.
Another change is that I am walking away from short stories for awhile. The last rejection actually hurt, and normally I have an iron armored hide when it comes to rejections. (Writing ones, emotional ones were always far far worse.) This one burned and it’s put me off short stories for the time being. I will focus entirely on Cawdor and other novels. (Anyway my black mood is perfect for writing Cawdor.)
No, this post isn’t about 2009 turning into 2010, ti’s about the memories that are fresh and vibrant in my head that have turned out to be 25 years old.
Way back in 1985 I was playing in a Starfleet Battles campaign. For those not in the know, Starfleet Battles is a game of ship-to-ship combat set in the Star Trek universe.
The game was a large and complex affair that just cried out for computer management. Sadly the makers of the game never seemed to understand that each addition, supplement, and rule errata contributed to making the game less and less playable. When I quite it had become the game you could not teach to new players.
Anyway in this campaign, players took on the roles of running star spanning empires, many that were in the original series and some that were created just for the game itself. (The game was a product of that time after the series was canceled but before the movies had gotten started. A curiously licensed product somehow outside of the control of Paramount.) I was the Gorn player. (Check the season one episode, Arena, to see the Gorns.)
Twenty five years latter I still remember the games, the players, the battles, and the man who ran all of it the incomparable Jimmy Diggs. Jimmy was man of great energy, fun, and vitality. When I knew him he was a security guard, but he went on to write scripts for episodes of Star Trek DS9, Star Trek Voyager, and other works.
How good were those times. No matter how good my times are now, and they are good, nor how much better they may grow, I’ll never have times like that again.
So here a link to a report that I found interesting.
The basic upshot is that this scientist, Wolfgang Knorr, did a study to see what has happen to the atmospheric fraction of carbon dioxide over the last 150 years. The assumption is that increasing fractions of carbon dioxide will drive a ‘greenhouse effect.’
In contradiction to some recent studies, he finds that the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide has not increased either during the past 150 years or during the most recent five decades.
I found that very interesting.
So over at Instapundit Glenn Renyolds has posted a picture from the White House Flickr page and asks readers to ‘Analyze the body language. From the White House Flickr page.‘
Here’s the photo:
Glenn Reynolds later followed up with an update to his post…
UPDATE: No, I don’t think Obama’s facial expression is just a fluke of when the shutter went off. His eyes aren’t closed, as some with poor displays seem to think. Here’s a detail from the frame:
And this enlargement of the photo.
The first thing that struck me about this is that this exercise is one of pure futility and pointlessness. Without the context of the situation you cannot analyze the body language. All you can do is project your on preconceptions into the picture. We don’t know what Biden is saying to Obama and knowing that bit of information is critical to having any understanding of the image.
Biden has a reputation for being a blabber-mouth and never knowing when to stop. Could be all Obama is reacting to is a never ending monolog. Biden could be flubbing or telling a rather dreadful joke. Biden could be suggesting white people and black people are equals. The two men could be discussing basketball. It could be anything going on in that picture.
The next thing I notice was how in very typical style, Glenn Reynolds didn’t post his own analysis of the picture. A very sly movie to keep his own name out of harm’s way. Anyone who wants to consider themselves in league with Instapundit can assume that their analysis matches up with Glenn’s, however Glenn has total deniability from any unseemly analysis because he never posted his own stand. (I do believe that he does indeed have a stand and that it is a calculated decision on his point not to post it.)
So here, quite publicly, is my New Year’s Resolutions for 2010.
I have not been putting in the hours of writing that I should have been, so the resolution is to reform my habit of writing every day, Monday through Thursday.
To achieve this, I am not allowing myself to play any game on my Xbox 360, Xbox, or PS3 on Monday through Thursday, unless I have written 1000 words that day.